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Archives > Volume 7 Issue 55 - October 2, 2009 Elizabeth Smart testifies she was raped daily...At knifepoint, Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her girlhood bedroom, she said, then led to a secluded mountain campsite, where a self-proclaimed prophet made her his 14-year-old polygamous "wife" in a quickie ceremony. AP News story here 
"After that he proceeded to rape me," Smart, now 21, said, sharing for the first time publicly her account of the ordeal.
Brian David Mitchell, a one-time street preacher, is accused of holding Smart captive for nine months. He has been behind bars since 2003 - mostly in a state mental hospital - but has yet to stand trial. At a court proceeding held Thursday over whether Mitchell, 55, is mentally competent to stand trial, Smart provided the horrifying account of her 2002 abduction. She testified that her captor raped her three or four times a day and threatened to kill her if she yelled or tried to escape. She was on the stand for nearly two hours, and her voice never wavered. Asked by a prosecutor to describe Mitchell, Smart replied: "Evil, wicked, manipulative, stinky, slimy, greedy, selfish, not spiritual, not religious, not close to God." Smart was rescued in March 2003 after a motorist spotted her walking the streets of a Salt Lake City suburb with Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Eileen Barzee. Twice Mitchell has been ruled mentally incompetent in state court, and he has often demonstrated bizarre behavior, including incessantly singing hymns in the courtroom and once yelling at a judge to repent. A federal judge ruled earlier this week that Smart's testimony is relevant to the question of Mitchell's competency. Mitchell's competency hearing is not set to begin until November 30, but Smart testified early because she is going on a religious mission for the Mormon church in Paris. In the days immediately following the 2002 kidnapping, Mitchell held Smart captive with the help of a 10-foot cable tethered to a line between two trees and bolted to her leg, she said. "He told me he was a prophet," Smart said under cross-examination by Mitchell's lawyer. "He said he was the voice of God on Earth and that he would reign over God's children until Jesus came." But she also said his religious revelations seemed to come only when he wanted something, or when he was trying to calm his wife. Smart said she believed Mitchell always knew that he could be punished for her kidnapping and understood how the court system worked. She said he gave her an alias - Augustine Marshall - and told her what to say to police if they were ever questioned. He also bragged about skirting previous accusations of sexual abuse and fooling others, Smart said. Never in nine months did Mitchell appear confused or out of control, Smart testified: "He was a very capable, intelligent human being." Smart had wanted to face her alleged tormentor Thursday, said her father, Ed Smart, but Mitchell was removed from the courtroom for disruptive behavior before Smart arrived. He watched the proceedings from a holding cell. "She actually wanted to face him," Ed Smart said. "She asked if he could be muzzled and sit and watch." See more about Elizabeth Smart at vol4_iss30 and vol4_iss52. ABC News reviews transcripts of Polanski's child rape victim's grand jury testimony... ABC News obtained transcripts of Samantha Geimer's 1977 grand jury testimony, which resulted in six charges against Roman Polanski. ABC News story here They include shocking 
details of 13-year-old Geimer testifying that the 43-year-old Polanski plied her with champagne and part of a Quaalude before performing oral, vaginal and anal intercourse on her, despite her demands to "keep away."
"I was ready to cry," she said. "I was going, 'No. Come on. Stop it.'" A former Los Angeles prosecutor who worked on the case said he believes that if people knew all the details, they would have less sympathy for Polanski. "It's outrageous," David Wells, a former assistant district attorney on the case, told ABCNews.com. "This pedophile raped a 13-year-old girl. It's still an outrageous offense. It's a good thing he was arrested. I wish it would have happened years before." Meanwhile, Los Angeles County's top prosecutor responded Thursday to criticism from Roman Polanski's supporters over his office's pursuit of the case, saying fugitives must be brought to justice and that the famed director committed a crime. LA Times story here "It's about completing justice," District Attorney Steve Cooley said. "Justice is not complete when someone leaves the jurisdiction of the court." Cooley took issue with attempts to minimize Polanski's admission that he had sex with a 13-year-old girl, particularly movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's recent description of the offense as a "so-called crime." "Mr. Polanski pled guilty to a crime, so apparently Mr. Polanski believes there's a crime," Cooley said. "There are still five or six other much more serious charges pending that have yet to be resolved." Mom who locked teen in Oklahoma closet has prior conviction in death of 2-year-old... LaRhonda McCall was convicted of second-degree manslaughter in New York in 1996 in the death of her 2-year-old daughter and served six months jail time. AP News story here Prosecutors in that case alleged McCall, who then went by LaRhonda Presley, 
essentially starved the toddler who died in February 1995, according to a New York grand jury indictment obtained by the AP.
Jaleasa McCall was 4 years old at the time and said Thursday that she doesn't remember her sister, but said she and her brother went to live with a cousin in New Jersey for several years after their mother was convicted. She said she moved to Oklahoma to live with her mother in 2007, a couple years after her brother moved to the state. Jaleasa, 18, told The Associated Press that her mother beat, whipped, choked and tied up her 14-year-old brother, often locking him away for days at a time. She said she would bring her brother food and sympathy, but couldn't summon the courage to call police. "He was losing a lot of weight. Some days he would be pale from being in there so long," McCall said. "He would really start to smell and stuff. It looked to me like he was losing hope." The mother, LaRhonda McCall, 37, and a friend, Steven Hamilton, 38, are jailed on 20 complaints each of child abuse and child neglect after the boy, malnourished and covered in bruises and scars, sought help from a security guard at a National Guard armory last Friday. A police affidavit says both acknowledged beating the boy and that he often was locked in a closet. The 14-year-old and the six other minor children, who range in age from 1 to 12, are in custody of the Department of Human Services, police said. Jaleasa McCall said she's not aware any of the children attended school. See more at vol7_iss54. In other news... 
California's inspector general has launched an investigation into one of the most mystifying questions in the kidnapping case of Jaycee Dugard: How was accused kidnapper Phillip Garrido able to keep her hidden for 18 years with police and parole officers assigned to check on him? ABC News story here Inspector General David Shaw told ABCNews.com that while the investigation only became public this week, it began "almost immediately" after Dugard, now 29, and the two children believed to be fathered by Garrido, were rescued. It is believed Garrido, 58, had five or six different state parole officers assigned by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation over the 18 years he imprisoned Dugard in his backyard, Shaw said. He was forced to register as a sex offender after being convicted of the rape and kidnapping of a woman in California in the 1970s. The investigation is twofold, Shaw said. First, "to see whether there was any misconduct on the part of any CDCR employee" and also to examine the system to see where improvements can be made statewide. For more on this story, see vol7_iss48, vol7_iss49, vol7_iss50, and vol7_iss52.
An FBI forensics lab identified a blood stain outline of a child in the fetal position in the trunk liner of accused child killer Casey Anthony's car, according to newly released documents. Fox News story here The information came in an e-mail from FBI Intelligence Analyst Karen B. Cowan to another agency employee written on September 30, 2008. Anthony, 23, of Orlando, is charged with murdering her 2-year-old daughter Caylee, hiding the child's remains and lying to investigators about a baby sitter kidnapping her. "If you look closely at this photo, there appears to be the outline or silhouette of a child in the fetal position," Cowan wrote. The e-mail was included among thousands more pages of information pertaining to the Anthony case that were released by the Florida state attorney's office. Included in the newly released documents was information that duct tape found on Caylee's mouth was contaminated by an FBI investigator. The contamination was discovered after FBI lab workers detected DNA from a girl or woman on the tape that didn't match that of Caylee, Anthony or her mother Cindy Anthony. After tests were conducted, the DNA was found to match that of a federal forensics documents examiner. See more on this story at vol6_iss78, and vol7_iss26.
President Obama's "safe schools czar," under fire from critics who say he's unfit for his job, acknowledged Wednesday that he "should have handled [the] situation differently" years ago when he was a schoolteacher and didn't report that a 15-year-old boy told him that he was having sex with an older man. Fox News story here Kevin Jennings, the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, was teaching high school in Concord, Massachusetts in 1988 when the boy, a sophomore, confessed an involvement with a man he had met in a bus station bathroom in Boston. Jennings has written that he told the boy, "I hope you knew to use a condom." In a statement issued Wednesday, Jennings said: "Twenty one years later I can see how I should have handled this situation differently. I should have asked for more information and consulted legal or medical authorities." Jennings, director of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, said he believes his office can now help keep other new teachers from making the same mistake.
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